Enhance people engagement in anti-corruption efforts

December 9, 2014, on International Anti-Corruption Day, in Hanoi, the Government Inspectorate and the United Nations Development Programmes (UNDP) organised a workshop called “Anti-Corruption Collective Action for Development”.

Mr. Huynh Phong Tranh, Government Inspector General said that it was the first time the Government Inspectorate had organised a workshop on anti-corruption with an absolutely new approach, making a space for international and national experts to share independent evaluation on anti-corruption in Vietnam and international experience on anti-corruption work.

Delivering a speech at the workshop, Ms. Dao Nga, Executive Director of Towards Transparency (TT) argued that corruption was very sophisticated and complex that government sector alone could not fight against it. Thus, TT suggested promoting people’s engagement in anti-corruption as a key solution. Citizens are not only victims directly affected by corruption, but also actors causing it to happen. According to a Transparency International’s survey on corruption in Vietnam, 30% of surveyed people admitted paying bribery for land, health, education, licensing procedure and 21% voluntarily gave bribery.

TT also recommended key areas to enhance people’s engagement in anti-corruption as following:

• Enhancing ability of citizens to access to information of public agencies, in particular by passing Law on Access to Information
• Enforcing initiatives that allow citizens, media and civil society organisations to participate in government’s efforts to increase transparency, accountability and integrity of public authorities
• Improving the monitoring mechanisms and collect opinion of the citizens on the public authorities’ activities, especially in the public service sector
• Further enhancing the effectiveness of the mechanisms for complaint resolution
• Specify and increase the effectiveness of measures to protect whistleblowers on corruption

In response to the question on Vietnam’s result in the 2014 Corruption Perception Index launched by Transparency International (TI) on December 2, 2014, Government Inspector General affirmed that both the result and evaluation of TI/TT this year was in accordance with the evaluation of the Party and the State on corruption recently. Besides, Government Inspector General stressed the importance of strengthening measures to protect and reward whistleblowers who report corruption properly.